


Mannequin on the Moon

by Nihilistic_Janitor



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25265818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nihilistic_Janitor/pseuds/Nihilistic_Janitor
Summary: A one-shot wondering, what if Mannequin wasn't the real Alan?
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	Mannequin on the Moon

April 17, 2007

The moon is three hundred eighty four thousand four hundred kilometers away from the Earth. To put a sense of scale to those numbers, the largest organ in the human body is the skin. It would take the skin of approximately one million nine hundred and ninety two thousand people, sliced into strips one centimeter wide, to span that distance.  
One million nine hundred and ninety two thousand. It’s a staggeringly large number. Perhaps it doesn’t quite get the scale across as well as I’d hoped. Three hundred eighty four thousand four hundred kilometers, or one million nine hundred and ninety two thousand people, neither is really a concept the human mind can wrap itself around under normal circumstances.  
One million nine hundred and ninety two thousand people. And every one of them with a name, and a life, all boiled down to a statistic, reduced to a long line of strung-together organs to reach the moon. Families, hopes, dreams, cut down to fuel some sort of measuring contest. A glorified ruler, was what their lives amounted to in the end. A scorecard.   
Ah yes, some hypothetical announcer says, the moon managed a score of one million, nine hundred and ninety two thousand deaths. Let’s see if anyone can top that.  
They have. There have been a lot of deaths in human history. Disease, war, famine, natural disasters. People kill each other, en masse, using gas and bombs and knives and guns, try to kill more than the other team until they’ve one. People die to diseases, judge diseases based on how well they’ve done. Oh wow, the Black Death is quite impressive, but smallpox is certainly trying its best, now isn’t it. People die when the food just stops coming. The potato crops whither, and people die, and if enough people die everyone gets a chance to hear about it. People look at natural disasters and how much damage they’ve caused, how many people they’ve killed. Oh, tornadoes and volcanoes are impressive, but hurricanes have really outdone themselves this season. Get past all of those, and you have an opportunity to die of old age, a chance to see your body slowly rot away under you, all that makes you who you are winding down, no longer working.  
Compare all of that to the one million nine hundred and ninety two thousand people who would give their hypothetical lives to reach the moon. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t so bad. Perhaps we kill another one million nine hundred and ninety two, get a second line, and then a third million to make it a ladder. Five million people, and now you can reach the moon. Five million deaths, and suddenly it’s possible. It’s a solution that’s gruesome, and ridiculous, and impractical, but it’s a solution. And people are certainly giving their lives for less, down there.  
Five million people, and I could go home. Fancy that.

April 18, 2007

Forgive me the morbidity of that last entry. I had a lot on my mind. The alarm for the water reclaimer went off and I was up all that night trying to fix it. I think I might have dropped one of my better wrenches down there too. I’m going to go take a look, see if I put it back in the toolbox or if I’m going to need to roll up my sleeves and go poking around a little more.

Alright, I dropped the wrench in the main water tank and didn’t notice, apparently. Going to have to refilter all of that after I get that out. Wonderful. Looks like I’m going to be thirsty a little while longer.  
Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. One of the problems with living in the Sea of Tranquility, I suppose. Although the views are to die for.  
I think I would be a lot funnier if I was a little less morbid.

April 20, 2007

I can see, from this desk, the sole monitor I have managed to keep working. It’s a very nice monitor, really. Ridiculously large, for one. The sort of monitor you see in sports stadiums. I didn’t often go to sports stadiums, but when I did, I was always impressed by the monitors they had there. Big enough to be seen from anywhere in the stadium. Also big enough to embarrass anyone in the stadium, with that kisscam thing.  
My wife loved that, for some reason.  
Maybe that’s why I wanted to put that giant monitor here, in the central hall. Or maybe I was trying to invoke Times Square with it. Don’t quite remember why, now.  
It’s also very high resolution. The benefits of having such a famous pet project, I suppose. Anyone who can get their tech in on what you’re doing has an easy ticket to fame. Whoever it was that figured out how to make this screen so high quality is probably very disappointed with how that turned out. Maybe they’ve hit the big time somewhere else. Maybe they sell their screens to sports stadiums. I’d like to think so, anyway. So many people sank time into getting this place off the ground-sometimes literally!-so it would be nice if all that effort paid off somehow.  
Well, niceness of the monitor aside, I’ll keep it off. Not as though there’s anything interesting on.

I wish I’d brought up a joke book. Seems like every time I try to be funny I just end up depressing myself.

April 21, 2007

I used to have an Xbox up here. Couple of games, a shooter, an RPG, popular stuff that a couple of the other guys helping me wanted me to check out. It was nice while it lasted, something to fritter away time with, keep myself sane. They say there’s only so much time you can spend shooting aliens before it gets stale, but I don’t think I ever really came close. Grab a different gun, try to do weird trick shots, turn the difficulty way up or way down.  
It didn’t last. My muse had me cannibalize it for parts. Water reclaimer needed a little something, oxygen filter needed a little something, waste recyclers needed a little something. Pretty soon I’m going to run out of spare parts.  
It’s all so tedious, and my muse barely seems to want to help anymore. Day in and day out I have to struggle to remember anything, anything at all. Day in and day out I have to struggle to pick through all the technology I have left to me to try and find anything that my muse says could help.  
They’re not even days, really. Not anymore. One of the things that had to go was the computer that managed the lights to give a proper day and night. The lights themselves had to go too. I have a little hand-crank emergency flashlight, at least, so it isn’t quite all darkness and misery.  
And I’ve still got light while the lunar day lasts.

April 22, 2007

Damn my muse damn me damn damn damn damn damn

April 23, 2007

Maybe one day my muse will decide to cooperate again. It’ll look down on me from wherever it is, and say, you know, this man has suffered enough. Perhaps he should make contact with the rest of humanity after his extended leave of absence. And suddenly, my mind will be awhirl again, a massive satellite dish laid out in beautiful diagrams and all its secrets revealed to me, and I’ll start peeling the metal off the walls and taking apart every last scrap of anything still left, and shout, “Here, up here!” And everyone down there on that little blue marble sees that its me, its really me, that they have some hope that I can return and my muse and I will come down from on high and build and build and build, and nothing would stop us.  
Nothing at all.

April 24, 2007

I found a stack of old blueprints in a closet behind a set of water filters. I’ve tried to design without my muse before, try to lure it in with ideas born from my own mind, but it doesn’t come like it did back when I was down there. Maybe if I have my old blueprints I can jog something.

April 27, 2007

I dragged my work desk into the room with the monitor. The light in here is better, the windows are huge, the open, empty, unfurnished space lets me forget the glorified terrarium I’m stuck in.  
It’s peaceful, away from the eternal humming of the damned, damned, danmded danmded damndedd life support machines I’m chained to every waking hour of every day.  
There’s the alarm again. It’s probably the water. Again.  
Did I mention I had to dismantle my flashlight?  
Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn damn

  
April 30, 2007

I could turn on the monitor.  
I might even have some time to myself, soon. Everything’s repaired, everything’s running. I’ve been working my fingers to the bone but I think, finally, finally, I’ll have a little break. And really, besides writing here, I don’t have much I can do besides the monitor.  
Except I know what’s on it. It may be a view of the world I left behind, but it’s not a view of that world I want to see.  
I could see the sky again, if only through a screen. I could see grass, and lakes, and rivers and mountains and valleys and towns people animals birdsfishsnakesbatscatsdogs  
But I wouldn’t. It’d just…  
I won’t turn it on.

May 5, 2007

Nutrient paste. Joy. My one true favorite meal in this whole wide world. Oh, the praises I could sing of nutrient paste! Pages and pages, pages and pages and pages. The consistency, so enticing, the way it jiggles slightly, condensation forming on its gelatinous, slightly oozing surface. The way it settles, slowly, over the course of days, spreading out like a bucket of polluted water in slow motion, making its way over your refined, upper class Styrofoam tray you’ve washed for the umpteenth time.  
The taste. Oh, the taste! It calls to mind the memories of the past with its overpowering nature. Like the time you knocked a paint chip out of your child’s hand, then immediately found the dog licking it. Like the time your older brother convinced you to lick a rubber band. Like the time you were working on the underside of a damned damned damned machine that wouldn’t work right for the millionth time and a panel popped open and choked you with a year’s worth of collected dust that had somehow worked its way in from outside.  
And the smell! That wonderful, wonderful smell. The sort of smell that works its way up into your sinuses, curls up there, and refuses to leave for hours. The sort of smell that clings to things, hovers in the air, lurks around corners to jump out at you, that waits until your about to sleep and then invades.  
I think I’ll treat myself to one more carrot.

May 9, 2007

Nobody’s ever coming up here. Nobody will read this. I will die up here, cold and alone, knowing that everyone thinks me dead or worse. My corpse will haunt the halls of this rotten skeleton of a dream until one day in the distant future the sun begins to expand, approaching close enough to boil the surface of this lump of rock, and everything I’ve ever accomplished will finally have been lost to oblivion.

May 11, 2007

Well. Perhaps someone will. Legend may come up here, just once, just to look over what could have been, and he will drift about, looking at the general state of disrepair. Here, the solar panels that would have powered a full neighborhood of homes. A forest of them, gleaming and angular, shining in the light of a naked sun and a trillion trillion stars. There, the unbuilt walls which would divide the cafeteria from the central hub from the shopping center. Walls that would mark out a whole city, a whole nation, would mark out the homes people would live happy, fulfilled, safe lives in. There, the cobwebbed ruins of some integral system that an alleged scientist had failed to fix in time. A scientist who was narcissistic enough to write long, arduously meandering paragraphs about his own death and the ‘legacy’ that he would leave behind. And there, next to it, the fabled man himself, a skeleton with bony fingers clutching a sun-bleached journal in one hand and a wrench in the other.  
Not a skeleton. Dessicated, but not decomposed. No bacteria here.  
He would pry the journal from my cold, dead hands, and he would open it, and he would read the tale of man caught in a cage of his own design. By a bird, no less.

May 15, 2007

It does temper the Earth’s beauty some to know that she is still down there. Wings stretching over a new, fearful city. One filled with monsters, murderers, ticking time-bombs of psychopathy. Hidden daggers in little girls’ lacy dresses. Old men with murderous intent gleaming in their eyes. An army of unpredictable foes who looked like us, talked like us, acted like us.  
She was just too good at what she did. How could you fight that? How did they fight that? Time after time after time the damn bird would appear and drive people mad and just how how how how how how how

May 19, 2007

She knew, she always knew. She’d known when I was up here all alone, making finishing tweaks to the atmospheric balance. She’d known where I had my home, my lab, my family back on Earth. She’d known how to strike, how to hit things just so, to cut me off so beautifully, to leave me utterly, completely, alone in the sky.  
And she’d known, too, where my prototypes had been. Where my hazardous environment exploration drone’s first model, clad in tinkertech porcelain, had been. She knew what parts of it to touch with her long, invisible grasp, how to twist it, how to pull it apart and stuff it full of knives and ooze and gas and hate. How to hide a small transmitter, and a small camera, and a small microphone, and a small tendency for showmanship.

May 20, 2007

The monitor on the wall only has one channel, now.

May 25, 2007

It’s a question I ask myself, sometimes. Do I really want to go back? There’s no family waiting for me down there. I have no more ideas for my beautiful colony. There are wars, there is blood and death and destruction. I see it, I’ve seen so much of it on the monitor’s one channel.  
But my memories, they tell me different. They tell me there are blue skies down there. That the warm sun can soak into your skin and the grass you lie on can cushion you and beside you there’s another person who you love more than anything else, so much so that you’d give her the moon. But you wouldn’t just give her the moon.  
You would give herI was going to give her a second Earth. Another world, just as beautiful as the first. With wind, and grass. With sun, and sea. It was going to be every bit the paradise I’d gotten a chance to taste down there.  
Was there still paradise left? It wasn’t just her. She wasn’t even the first, she was the most recent. There were entire families, entire cities, entire islands gone from the world. And it wasn’t just them. There were other villains, humans, other humans who looked on their fellow man and decided to hate and attack and fight and kill. The only channel I could see.  
Ah well. I have time now. Time to think about these things, and write them down.

June 1, 2007

Maybe I’ll turn the monitor on. Just for a moment, to see what the world looks like now.

—Retrieved by Legend from Earth Bet’s moon, July 14, 2017.


End file.
